US House minority whip Roy Blunt flew to San Antonio, last week, to pay tribute to Texas Pastor and apocalyptic nuclear war advocate John Hagee. In a "Christians United For Israel" [CUFI] mailing sent February 26th, Hagee wrote:

I am delighted to announce that Roy Blunt is a strong supporter of Israel and following our conversation about CUFI has offered to gather groups of Congressmen in his office any time I come to Washington D.C. in the future.

Blunt is not the only politician to have courted Hagee, who had a private meeting with Senator John McCain in late January to discuss Israel and "other matters". McCain has recently said, of US tensions with Iran, that the situation could be "armageddon"

John Hagee, one of several alleged religious influences on George W. Bush, has characterized liberal Jews who do not agree with his political views as "poisoned" and is a strong proponent for a "preemptive" ( or unprovoked ) US and Israeli nuclear attack against Iran. Hagee has also recently appeared to describe the Holocaust as a divine mechanism to scare Jews into moving to Israel where, Hagee seems to believe, they will be mostly wiped out in the apocalyptic conflict the Texas pastor has also formed a lobbying group to provoke.

In a recent Charisma Magazine issue John Hagee, in a piece entitled "The Coming Holy War", wrote : "Israel and America must confront Iran's nuclear ability and willingness to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons."

On July 19, 2006, at a CUFI sponsored Washington DC event called "A Night to Honor Israel", with GOP Party head Ken Mehlman and US GOP Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum ( President George W. Bush sent recorded greetings to the event ) , Pastor John Hagee declared :

"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation [...] and [the] Second Coming of Christ."

[7-4-2011 - update and correction: the text, above, is a misquote incorrectly attributed to John Hagee--who has publicly declared (CUFI Washington D.C. summit 2007) that "It is time for America to consider a military preemptive strike against Iran to prevent a nuclear holocaust in Israel and a nuclear attack in America" but has not directly stated that this will bring about the end-time scenario Hagee predicts.
For an extended discussion of this misquote, see Christians United For Israel Lashes Out (Anatomy of a Misquote)
For an extensive collection of sourced John Hagee quotes here at Talk To Action - see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Hagee's beliefs are actually part of mainstream Christian Zionist thought, which tends to hold that, after Christians are "Raptured" bodily up to heaven, most Jews ( 2/3 to be precise ) will die in a subsequent terrible conflict centered around Israel.

As recounted by Terje Langeland, reporting for the Colorado Springs Independent in 2003, one of Pastor John Hagee's CUFI board members, George Morrison, expresses his sense of how Israeli and Israeli Jews will fare in the apocalytpic scenario Hagee and others long for :

"Morrison, whose casual, folksy manner belies his apocalyptic beliefs, already sees signs that the End is approaching. The European Union, he says, might be the alliance of nations that according to prophecy will join the Arabs to wage war against Israel during the final days.

I don't buy the conspiracy angle. This is all to do with politicians pandering to leaders of the religious right to curry favor with their congregations and followers.

In fact I would go so far as to say that these politicians have no intention of following through with anything but a few token gestures towards the religious right. Look at George Bush. He was supposed to be the religious right's Great White Hope, and yet apart from nominating a couple of right-wing judges and moderately funding his Faith Based Initiative program, he has been a great disappointment to them.

I don't believe for one second that people like John McCain, or even Mitt Romney, have any great desire to move this country further to the right. They are simply paying lip service because they hope it will help them get the Republican nomination next January.

Now, that's not to say I think their approaches to the religious nutjobs like Hagee is completely harmless. The more they do it, the more they nudge the political debate to the right, and they lend undeserved credibility to those who hold these far-out views. But there is no conspiracy, at least amongst anyone with any real power.

I used to watch John Hagee when I first came to the USA just out of a sense of lurid fascination. He conducts his services like a tin-pot dictator, bossing around his congregation and telling them over and over what a pitiful bunch of people they are.

He is part of a distressing trend where the lunatic fringe of Christian pastors is being courted by national politicians. James Dobson I can sort of understand since, while his views are very right-wing, he is not too far out of mainstream conservatism, but people like John Hagee and Rod Parsley (from Ohio) are full blown loons in comparison.

What next? Is Rudi Giuliani going to pay homage to Paul and Jan Crouch to burnish his credentials with the fundamentalists? I'm a little surprised, actually, that these politicians have shown up on TBN yet. Perhaps appearing on that network with its nationwide reach is still a little bit too much exposure for comfort.

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